Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (Operation Northwoods)
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff · 13 March 1962
This is the document the case file is about. It is short, it is signed, and it says what it says — which is why the page you are reading exists: so the claim and the paper can be checked against each other in two clicks rather than taken on trust.
Open the PDF — 15 pages, 0.8 MB
Hosted here in full. Nothing has been re-compressed, re-OCR’d or altered.
What is on which page
PDF p.1
The cover memorandum. Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, subject “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)”, signed L. L. Lemnitzer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. The TOP SECRET / SPECIAL HANDLING / NOFORN banners are struck through and overstamped UNCLASSIFIED. Paragraph 2 forwards the proposal “as a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes.”
PDF p.8 (document p.5)
Appendix to Enclosure A, marked DRAFT. Establishes the chain: it responds to a request from the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, for General Craig, subject “Operation MONGOOSE”, dated 5 March 1962, which asked for “brief but precise description of pretexts which the Joint Chiefs of Staff consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.”
PDF p.10 (document p.7)
Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A — the page headed “PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA”. This is where the operative list begins: “A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces,” followed by numbered items including “Land friendly Cubans in uniform ‘over-the-fence’ to stage attack on base” and “Start riots near the base main gate.”
PDF p.10 (document p.7) — the annex’s own caveat
Before any proposal, the annex states: “The courses of action which follow are a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes. They are arranged neither chronologically nor in ascending order.” Nothing should be read into the sequence of the items. The eleven Guantanamo items begin here, and two carry a parenthetical routinely dropped when they are quoted: “Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base” and “Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans)” — the people to be caught were to be American-directed.
PDF p.11 (document p.8) — the “Remember the Maine” passage, and the split that matters
“A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms”, and the document gives two distinct ones. 3.a: “We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.” 3.b: “We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters”, with “an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” The famous casualty-lists sentence belongs to 3.b, where the crew does not exist and the casualties would be fabricated. Accounts that splice 3.a and 3.b together — ours did — produce a claim the document does not make.
PDF p.12 (document p.9) — the sentence that is rarely quoted
In the terror-campaign paragraph: “We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.” No drone, no non-existent crew — a proposal to wound real refugees on American soil for publicity. The same page proposes “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots” and, at item 6, that “an F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG”.
Note. The case file describes this as a 16-page document; the National Security Archive scan hosted here is 15 pages. The discrepancy is in the page count of the scan, not in any quoted text. On 6 September 2026 the case file’s quotations were re-checked against this copy by rendering the page images directly — this PDF carries no text layer, so nothing here can be verified by text search — and three errors in the case file were found and corrected: a spliced quotation, a dropped parenthetical, and an omitted sentence. The pins above record what the pages actually say.
Provenance and licence
Released by: U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Original copy: National Security Archive, George Washington University. We did not obtain this document; we are hosting a copy so that the citation in the case file resolves to something durable.
Licence: Public domain — work of the U.S. federal government.
How this copy was checked: Page 1 was rendered and read directly: heading, date, subject line and Lemnitzer's signature block all match the citation. The pretext list was located at PDF p.10 and its wording compared against the quotations in the case file.
15 pages · 0.8 MB · PDF